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Green Building Bible, Fourth Edition
Green Building Bible, fourth edition (both books)
These two books are the perfect starting place to help you get to grips with one of the most vitally important aspects of our society - our homes and living environment.

PLEASE NOTE: A download link for Volume 1 will be sent to you by email and Volume 2 will be sent to you by post as a book.

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    • CommentAuthordelboy
    • CommentTimeJun 3rd 2009
     
    I'm looking to monitor electricity consumption of various different units.

    Can anyone recommend a logger which measures both power load and overall energy consumption? The logger would then be able to upload data into Excel.

    I'm envisaging a bit of kit which measures power load every 5/10/30 seconds and every 1/2/5/10/30 mins (for example), as well as giving energy used every hour/day/week/month/year.

    If anyone can recommend anything in particular, I'm interested.

    Cheers

    PS Also if I'm missing something obvious please say so
    • CommentAuthorCWatters
    • CommentTimeJun 3rd 2009
     
    What level of accuracy do you want? Many just measure current and assume the voltage is 230V. They multiply current by 230 to give the power. Problem is the voltage isn't allways constant. In my area it can vary upto nearly 250V at times.
    • CommentAuthordelboy
    • CommentTimeJun 3rd 2009
     
    I'd like it accurate to the nearest watt / watt hour.

    Can you get kit that measure current and voltage and then multiply to get power (and then energy)?
  1.  
    Hi,
    when i check these out they ar seemd to log the instantaneous power whcih could be every6 sec to 3 mins. but none recorded an accumulation. So i could see how much somthing took instantly. I wanted to meaure how much say the fridge & freezer used. So I was after something like a plug ion version of a usual elec meter. I was looking to see KwHr over different peiods such as day , night etc. Couldnt find anyhting that did this.
    Cheers
    Mike up North
    • CommentAuthorralphd
    • CommentTimeJun 3rd 2009 edited
     
    Not cheap, but can do a lot more than just monitor power.
    http://www.welserver.com/
    • CommentAuthortrule
    • CommentTimeJun 3rd 2009
     
    Do you want/need to measure this over a long time? The welserver would do the trick and the price is reasonable for a datalogger.

    But its a lot of money to measure power consumption when a 10-20 £ plugin unit can do a good enough job. Plug it in, measure for a week, manually put the numbers in a spread sheet. Or measure the power consumed for a cycle of the appliance (dish washer etc). Much easier and accurate enough.

    The welserver, or any thing else, is great if you want to do this kind of thing as a hobby...
  2.  
    Hi,
    Problem is that there are no numbers to put in a spread sheet. Most of the devices simply give an instantaneous kWhr. It wont accumulate so there is no start value and final value to go into a sheet to calc the usage/consumption. If the device shows say 0.24kwhr (ie fridge and a few bits are on) if you return an hour later it might still show 0.24 kWhr. BUT in the mean time these items may well have been off, so you have not used 0.24 kwhr ien 240w (which is J per second) continually for a period of 3600 seconds (1 hour). All you know is that is was consuming @ 0.24 "rate" and was consuming at 0.24 "rate" when yopu came back. What happened in between is unknown. The value of kWhr is based on a value at that time only.
    Other than switching off whole circuits at the board and using the meter its actually quite tricky to do this.
    Cheers
    Mike up North
    • CommentAuthortrule
    • CommentTimeJun 4th 2009 edited
     
    I have a device from 7 years ago that has instantaneous, accumulated, peak and average consumption. It was under 20 £, but a Euro device (round pins).

    First link on google does more or less the same:
    http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=power+consumption+monitor&btnG=Google+Search&meta=cr%3DcountryUK%7CcountryGB&aq=f&oq=

    so does the second...
    • CommentAuthorralphd
    • CommentTimeJun 4th 2009
     
    I have a plug-in unit (kill-a-watt). I left my beer fridge plugged into it for a week; it was around 2kWh. The fridge is in my basement with an ambient temp around 17C, so that probably helps with the power usage.

    -Ralph
  3.  
    Hi, yes that looks good thats what you need. I have a wireless OWL one and it dosnt do the consumption over a time period (and it eats batteries (rechargable of course). Once youve got past the initial interest of instant power being drawn you need to llok at consumption becuas that is most affected by lifestlye and how and when you operte things.
    Cheers,
    Mike up North
  4.  
    At the start of the year I was also after a device that could measure KWH of plug in devices. While there are a lot of plug in devices most are fair basic. I got this product form amazon please see link. It is able to accumulate kwh used over whatever time period you want, as well as check voltage (see early comment), electrical frequency, power factor and Electrical current + other things that are beyond me. The two main downsides are that once you unplug the monitor it does not have a back up battery so it looses the info (answer is to have it on an extension if the socket is in an difficult to see area) and secondly you cannot download info to a computer (Paper and pen transfer only!!) Here is the link to the monitor: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Plug-Power-Energy-Monitor-Meter/dp/B000Q7PJGW/ref=pd_cp_office_0
    •  
      CommentAuthorSteamyTea
    • CommentTimeJun 6th 2009 edited
     
    Delboy

    I have been looking at doing the same and have decided to go with this logger with some current sensors.
    http://www.onsetcomp.com/products/data-loggers/u12-006
    Not cheap though. Main reason for choosing it was that I can get other sensors later and I had a good experience with the Hobo Weather logger (which costs about 4 times as much).

    I am currently using iButtons to log temperature around the place and they seem to work well (all being that the resolution is pretty poor, but good enough for a house).

    So all I need now is a cheap solar logger, any ideas anyone?

    Nick

    Forgot the link earlier
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